Slate Recommends

Slate Recommends

The Best New Books

Top picks from the Slate Book Review.

My Friend Dahmer, by Derf Backderf
Backderf’s his new graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer, is the true story of the author’s high school interactions with a young Jeffrey Dahmer in the mid-1970s. Backderf illustrated the inaugural issue of the Slate Book Review.

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At Last, by Edward St. Aubyn
The latest of Aubyn’s masterful novels of privilege and the ways it warps its victims.

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion
Using grief over her daughter’s death as point of entry to her anxieties late in life, Didion confronts not just her own frailty but the long and swerving arc of her creative career. The results are haunting.

Helvetica and the New York City Subway System, by Paul ShawThis beautiful book tells the story of the signs that line New York’s subway stations, and it’s a masterful piece of reporting—one that reveals as much about the perils and pleasures of urban bureaucracy as that favorite fiction of Slate readers, the television series The Wire.

The History of History, by Ida Hattemer-HigginsA portrait of madness that is wildly inventive, and often just plain wild.

The Pale King,by David Foster WallaceOf all of David Foster Wallace’s much-discussed and much-avoided fiction—his three novels and his three collections of short stories—we submit that The Pale King is, contrary to what you might guess, the best place to start.

The Psychopath Test, by Jon RonsonIf you’ve ever wondered if you’re a psychopath, take heart: the fact that you’re wondering means you’re not.

By Blood, by Ellen UllmanWhat is most distinctive about Ullman’s voice is the way it sounds fully formed, mature both intellectually and emotionally.

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Gods Without Men by Hari KunzruA sprawling, messy dreamscape of a novel tjay explores the myths and mysteries of the Mojave.